With a recent demand for improvement of the fuel consumption of automobiles, vehicles having the function of idle reduction have drawn attention. For example, a technique disclosed in Patent Literature 1 is known as the technology relating to the timing of a restart of an engine from the state of idle reduction. This proposed technique sets the timing of a restart of the engine from the state of idle reduction in an MT (manual transmission) vehicle to the time of a release of a clutch pedal after a gear change with a step-on of the clutch pedal.
This proposed technique, however, causes a relatively long engine stop time, which results in extending the discharge time of a battery and may lead to untimely degradation of the durability performance of the battery.
This problem is not limited to the MT vehicles but is commonly found in any vehicles having the function of idle reduction, such as AT (automatic transmission) vehicles.